Wednesday, January 5, 2011

Ontology 101 Part Five

Which entities, if any, are fundamental? Are all entities objects?

The spoon is an admirable shape, especially when it holds a galaxy of sugar. I am stunned by the fullness of a full moon above the city hill and its twinkling lights. Further are the mountains. I grow into myself as I age, becoming fuller as I become less of myself. Nothingness is fertile. Ganglions wrestle the void. The circumference of the globe spins through space creating time, years, months, days. I am tickled by the ticking of the clock. And yet I cannot adjust to the imperial dictates of time.

An entity is a discrete phenomenon which makes itself available to consciousness as an abstraction or a perception. A hammer, a screwdriver, a column of water shooting up into the sky, a barking dog, a cat sleeping on the bed. Or a square or a rectangle or a circle. Or the idea of a circle. But how does an entity make itself available to the mind as an abstraction? That is to say, if there is nothing there to perceive? Is an idea an entity? If an idea is an entity, then anything the mind might conceive could be an entity. In which case, everything and anything is possible. There are no limits. And if there are no limits, then everything becomes a vast mental blur, a vast field of muzzy circumstantiality.

Where, then, is external reality to be found? If it is not already in the mind, then where is it?

The entity shatters unity. It becomes iron. It becomes a moon and the orbit of the moon. It owns itself by way of its determination. But what does it determine and who or what gives it determination? The mind stumbles through its language in quest of its being. How did it acquire being? The mind acquires being through an entity. The entity is compelling. It is a pocket. Leibnitz’s monad. With loose change. It abhors nothing. Except a vacuum. And the vacuum itself is an entity. And so ascends the dawn of a new conception of language and perception.

A tree propels silk because it is aroused by jokes. Awed and held and gantry. The cloud ignites in incandescent report. A tonic accentuated loaf begun by vein.

The hirsute erects a paper. And the bikini becomes soft in that walnut. The fractions seethe like seminal morning. Spring pleads grease and there is a knot that whistles and a need that fumes. This pain is for the mouth and skull to articulate in a novel.

The punch bag is more than its cuticles. A Parisian orchard is more or less brindled among its hinges. The biography of a jerk is operated by dream. And the veins bloom amid their blood, even as a catfish is caressed by the river in which it lives and is carried to places where the water gurgles under the shadows of cottonwood and willow. Oats amplify the smell of this for a bug. Massive roots show what grace there is in bark.

The interior is illumined by pharmaceutical. A smooth redeeming jug imbues the meditation on lithography. I find bottles along the walk that cause necessity to flow into gravity. And forge cocoons that the unfettered churn of wind brings into being.

Each oddity bequeaths itself to the glorious fantasy of the sky. Purple is obscure at fibers in glue. A faucet tumbles through its water. A nimble Elizabethan pulls his rapier and floods this feeling with a sorcery of movement.

Bones crackle in Picasso. And in guns that the grammar of war garbles into a wicked symmetry of bark and cannon.

The charm of autumn unbinds us in its sculpture. Strength elevates our hunger above our handsprings. A tiger talks among rocks. Panic visits distance. The sticks sing. The paragraph obtrudes its images of heaven. An obscure injury forms a scar in the shape of a key.

An inflammation of the soul is hoisted by winch and slowly turns, exhibiting various sides of voice and spirit. The many emotions that fill a soul during the day and its slow accidents of tea and plug and cloud and beauty.

Poland is a rock. Experience comes in streams. Dissonance is good for garlic. It is sometimes enough to suppose that a cow has fireworks and that abstractions form between the threads of an embroidered romance. The larynx is neither a bag nor an olive but an intention of nerves and mucus and membrane that make a voice claim its penumbras. Even the calliope is unpredictable.

The trapeze is green. And the enigma of the entity is solved by wheels of the lotus. The things that make a flower spin into granite, creating fossils of expansion, peacocks at the fringe of our language. The seen and the unseen. Being and nothingness. Nothingness and being.

About Me

John Olson is the author of Backscatter: New And Selected Poems, from Black Widow Press, Souls Of Wind, a novel about the notorious French poet Arthur Rimbaud in the American West, from Quale Press, and The Nothing That Is, an autobiographical novel from Ravenna Press. Larynx Galaxy, a collection of essays and prose poetry, appeared in June, 2012, from Black Widow Press. The Seeing Machine , a novel about French painter Georges Braque, appeared from Quale Press in fall 2012.